On Not Writing

I have been in a writing slump for months. When I say slump, what I actually mean is that I simply have not been writing. Call it writer's block, post hand in malaise, whatever - but the truth is that for many writers this kind of writing desert fills us with fear and panic. 

Mine started after I had sent the almost final version of my MS to my publisher - it was fine to begin with - well, not fine but expected. Then in May I fell over and banged the back of my head. I was not knocked out, I didn't break anything (I've had a head scan). But what it has done is left me with a thing called post concussion syndrome - something I knew nothing about before but is, apparently, quite common. There are some physical effects - scalp pain, headaches etc, but by far the worst thing (for me) has been the way that it has effected my critical and creative thinking. I was literally unable to put together new courses or write book reviews. I could critique single poems, but I couldn't hold a whole pamphlet or collection in my head. 

Of course this has had a knock-on effect on my earning ability as I had been planning to write and then run a new email course in September or October and I wasn't able to do that - and as most freelancers can tell you - losing that momentum in the freelance world can cost you customers long term. When I put out feelers on my social media accounts recently about potentially running a new email course, I had not a single enquiry. I can only assume that the lack of activity has affected the algorithms so that my posts are less seen, or that my prolonged absence has meant my potential clients have moved on and found other tutors to fill the hole.

Anyway, this post is not really about that. Luckily my symptoms are (very slowly) improving and during the Christmas break (after a couple of weeks of getting back to morning pages) I have even written one or two (fairly awful) poems. My biggest worry now is that perhaps everything I write post head-injury might be trite rubbish, but I have to trust that slowly and with regular practice that the skills will come back. One of the things I had been looking forward to was The January Writing Hours with Kim Moore and Clare Shaw. What is brilliant is that they operate a pay what you can system for people (like me) who are down on their luck. For anyone unfamiliar with the format - they run a one hour writing workshop each morning in January where they share poems and offer prompts. It's become very popular, with almost 300 participants this year. Today was day five and while not all the prompts have inspired me, some of them really have. And most importantly I am writing, I am moving the pen across the page, and I am finding things to write about.

So what is it I am trying to say here - probably not to despair if you hit a writing slump or setback - even if it goes on for months. Perhaps cut yourself a little slack to begin with - sometimes we just need a break - especially when life is super stressful or busy, or like me something medical gets in the way. Keep reading though, even if it's just the odd poem. I did keep reading when I was able and I am sure this has helped. Eventually a poem might speak to you or inspire you and send you back to the page. And maybe a workshop (Verve Poetry Festival runs a great and affordable online workshop series) or something like the January Writing Hours will help. (I can also offer single lessons which contain links to poems to read and prompts on a variety of different subjects - contact me through my website https://juliawebb.org/ or on social media for details).

If you like what I do please consider buying me a coffee https://buymeacoffee.com/hqdiufpgsz

The Post Hand-in Slump

The last couple of months have been quietish for me. One reason being I tripped over in August and have been suffering effects of concussion ever since, but secondly because I am in that kind of weird limbo space that comes after you finish writing a poetry collection. It's a similar feeling to what happens on courses when one finishes a project - at art school we used to call it the post-hand in slump. 

And slump is exactly what it feels like. It's a kind of no man's land for a writer. The big final push has been made and the  project has been finished. Most of the edits are done. It's a waiting game then, and there are months (years sometimes) before the book becomes real. And usually at this point there is no real writing to be done - in fact, if I hadn't been here before, I might think I might never write again! I've just looked it up and Google tells me it's post-project depression - and adds that it might be necessary for replenishing our batteries before we plunge ourselves into another project. It makes sense I guess. 

It does feel like a kind of limbo though - that space between finishing a book and it coming out - with some publisher's that gap can be years. I guess I am lucky that my wait is not quite that long! There has been some movement today though - the first endorsement (for the cover) came through, and it was more than I could have hoped for. Also this week artist and designer Natty Peterkin sent some potential cover images over to my publisher and my editor liked the same one I did. These are the little things that help it feel real - that there might really be a book at some point. 

The value of writing workshops and courses

I have heard a lot of criticism levelled at writing workshops and courses and I would like to set out my case in their defence - and not because I run workshops, but because as a writer I find them invaluable.

I have spent the last couple of years (well longer really) working on a collection loosely themed around grief and loss. I was lucky enough to get an Arts Council DYCP grant last year which enabled me to take valuable time away from earning a living to write, to travel to Wiltshire to revisit where my mum is buried and I was also able to participate in two different Arvon at Home weeks.

Sometimes my students and mentees are surprised when I tell them that I feel it is important that I still attend workshops and writing weeks. I think they imagine that by book four you will magically have the formula for a good collection at your fingertips. Not so. The truth is that despite doing research - reading around my subject area (loss/grief themed poetry, fiction and non fiction) and attending a course about grief - I was still left with myself and my own style of writing, my own preoccupations. Although I had written some poems I was happy with I had come to a point where anything new I was writing felt a bit samey. and there were also one or two events that I wanted to write about but hadn't managed too. One of these was my mum's funeral and the other was the trip I had made to where she was buried - when there my friend and I had immediately seen an enormous hare followed by deer - this had felt like some kind of sign, but for the life of me I couldn't write about it. What I needed was for someone to rattle my cage, to jolt me out of my comfortable writing rut.

The bones of the title sequence 'Grey Time', came out a zoom prose poem workshop with Carrie Etter. I started writing it in the workshop and just couldn't stop writing for about an hour afterwards. Sometimes an exercise, a poem, or something someone says can just unlock something in your head. 

What those two Arvon weeks did was to give me me new ways to approach my subject matter - new ways into writing. In the first of the weeks Rebecca Goss introduced us to a recent form called the centena - a poem of exactly 100 words (excluding the title) opening and ending with the same three words. This tiny form proved to be exactly the kind of container I need to talk about my mum's funeral. It might sound counterintuitive but sometimes a tight writing constraint can actually be freeing. I surprised myself!

The second of the two courses was with Tara Bergin and Yomi Sode and was looking at ways of using research in poetry. This course yielded a massive harvest for me in terms of moving my book forward. Tara's writing exercises are very complicated, but precise, and this somehow opened up mind to possibilities and ways of writing. I was able to bring to the table things that I might never have considered using - map references, references to art works etc. I did a lot of research and reading that week - none of it specifically about grief, but all connected to things I was trying to write about. I wrote a lot that week - all of it surprising, and several of the poems have become the backbone of the collection. One of the components of an Arvon course is that you get a tutorial with each of the tutors and this was really fruitful for me too. Yomi offered me some excellent editing advice on the poem that now opens the collection and Tara made a suggestion that changed how I thought about the collection entirely. I had a sequence of prose poems that ran over two or three pages - just a couple of line breaks between each one. Tara suggested that they each needed to be on a page of their own. This blew my mind - I knew immediately that she was right, but it meant that the sequence would run over nine or ten pages rather than two. This meant I would need to take  more poems out. I was reluctant to do this at first, but realised as I was editing that I needed to take out everything that felt that didn't feel like it fitted with my main themes - loss/grief/, violence, motherhood and neurodivergence. This sounds like a wide remit but actually the themes really feed into one another - the main thrust of the collection being different types of loss. I took out a lot of poems but the result is a collection that feels much more coherent. 

I want to say here that workshops and courses aren't always entirely pleasurable. Sometimes they push you into uncomfortable territory. Sometimes exercises seem pointless or you feel resistance to them (the ones I resist most usually yield the best results), sometime they make my head hurt - but in a good way - because I am learning and being pushed out of my comfort zone. As a writer I feel I need this otherwise I would just write the same book over and over again. Yes, my preoccupations may be the same but challenging myself gives me new ways to come at them, new insights, new ways of working. Hopefully the results are worth it.

Writerly Preoccupations

When I was batting around ideas for a workshop one of the exercises I came up with was getting the participants to look at what preoccupies them as a writer - what interests them and inspires them, what themes they keep coming back to. As always I did the exercise myself to see what happened and it turned out to be a really useful and productive thing to do. 

You might want to try it - think about what interests you as a writer or artist? What are your preoccupations? What subjects or themes interest you? What things do you find yourself coming back to? Don't just limit yourself to things you have written about - I am interested in many different things that directly, but sometimes indirectly into my work. I found I learnt things about myself by doing this exercise.

Here are mine:

Human relationships place; the intersection between the human world, the natural world and the mystical realm; how events changes us - especially loss and grief; family dynamics; how place affects us and/or shapes us; psychology and counselling; music and lyrics; the past and how we repeat behaviour patterns; cruelty and violence (and the reasons for it); myth and fairytale; parallel universes; a Utopian future; the disintegration of a caring democratic society; repetition and internal rhyme; other worlds; art house film; stories where the ending is ambiguous or left open; other species; where wildness encroaches on order; edges and borders; otherness; the the physical body (and how it ages); being a parent - and how that changes over time; loss and grief; the stories and lies we tell ourselves (and others); memory; collective memory; the way memory changes over time; trauma and how its passed down through families.

girl was born - an exploration of a poem

I was recently asked to write some background to one of my poems and explain why I used a particular form for it. It is interesting going back to a poem and trying to remember the intention behind it. I couldn't remember when I wrote the poem - except I knew it was before I moved house in 2021. The intentions were clearer to me and the reasons I laid it out as prose poem with slashes. I will share the poem and what I wrote. The poem is from my book The Telling.

girl was born

girl was in the world / her mother was a horse / and her father was a pony / or was it the other way round / girl never knew when a day would turn sour / the world was a farmyard full of plastic animals / the houses were wooden / tiny painted rectangles for windows / nothing to look out from / girl looked out of her rectangular eyes with longing / girl reached for quiet / she reached for making sense / the words danced themselves up and down on the page / until finally she understood them / girl was born too late / or too early / she became a sister / then she became a sister again / she ran up the slippery stairs two at time / she jumped down them / girl was a ratty tennis ball / somewhere along the way she lost her bounce / girl was born a second time / girl was born of the woods / her father was a pine tree / her mother was a bramble / the house was full of midges / there was no way of returning to where she had come from / she picked up a twig shaped like a gun and aimed it

I wrote this as a stream of consciousness piece. I was thinking about how it felt like I had two different lives as a child. The first life from birth to three years old where we lived in a bedsit in my mum's friend's house in London (Ealing) - the friend had three kids, a dog and was a dress maker, the house was always busy. And then the second life when we moved to Thetford, a small town in Norfolk. There we had a two bedroom council house and I was the only child until my sister was born two years later. In Thetford the house was quiet. During the day it was just me and my mum. We lived opposite a pine wood - that wood was a big part of my childhood and often creeps into my poems, as does the pine forest that Thetford was surrounded by. I was a bright (some might say precocious) child (I was also neuro-divergent but we didn't know that then). I refused to go to nursery and also insisted on learning to read when I was 3 or 4. I learned using the Dr Seuss books. I was also a tomboy - preferring cars and guns to dolls. 

The poem is about a girl trying to make sense of the world around her. The objects (such as toys) become anchors or signs to steer by. Sometimes the separation between the girl and the object becomes blurred. I have always imagined people as different types of animal and object and vice versa. It helps me to make sense of things and is probably heavily influenced by the types of book I read as a child - fairytales, Tolkien and Enid Blyton - books where animals and trees talk and the most surprising and surreal things can happen. 

The order of the poem is not logical, it is not a linear chronologically ordered narrative. Memories are generally not linear - one memory can spark another and another. I knew it would probably be a prose poem as I was writing it. I like the density of a prose poem and the way it can keep that stream of consciousness feel. When it came to editing it, using conventional punctuation like full stops and commas felt wrong. Commas and full stops made each thought (each segment) feel too final, too separate somehow, but I still felt like I needed to break up the text with more than just a simple space. The use of the space in place of punctuation feels (to me) like it slows down the speed at which one reads the text. I like the use of slashes in poems - it feels like each slash is a momentary pause in thought - but exactly that - momentary, the eye moves on fairly quickly as the text feels more cohesive than if it had gaps and line breaks. It also means that you can break the syntax of the poem in unexpected places (a little like enjambement I suppose). I like this and when I read the poem out loud, I do read it with these tiny breaks. It might sound a little jarring at first, but I like this - it feels right for the voice of the poem.  Natalie Diaz says of her slashed poems "I hope they make the readers’ eyes uncomfortable, that they physically and musically express the disjointed, jagged experience explored in the poem."

You can buy my book The Telling from Nine Arches Press - https://www.ninearchespress.com/publications/poetry-collections/the-telling

Books Read in 2021

 

• 1) The Actual - Inua Ellams (poetry)
• 2) The Air Year - Caroline Bird (poetry, re read)
• 3) Antiemetic for Homesickness - Romalyn Ante (poetry, re read)
• 4) How to Wash a Heart - Bhanu Kapil (poetry, Re read)
• 5) The Coming-Down Time - Robert Selby (poetry)
• 6) Love and Other Thought Experiments - Sophie Ward (fiction)
• 7) Little Fires Everywhere - Celeste Ng (fiction)
• 8) Floating, Brilliant, Gone - Franny Choi (poetry)
• 9) The Book of Jobs: Poems - Kathryn Maris (poetry)
• 10) I Want! I Want! - Vicki Feaver (poetry)
• 11) My Year of Rest and Relaxation - Ottessa Moshfegh (fiction)
• 12) How to Change Your Life in 7 Steps - John Bird (non fiction)
• 13) A Song For Dark Times - Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 14) Pepper Seed - Malika Booker (poetry)
• 15) Widowish - Melissa Gould (non fiction)
• 16) Pocket Bowie Wisdom (non fiction)
• 17) Lifted - Bill Manhire (poetry)
• 18) Another Planet - Tracey Thorn (non fiction)
• 19) Self Portrait in Green - Marie NDiaye (non fiction/fiction)
• 20) Juul Kraijer - Ina Fuchs (non Fiction, art)
• 21) The Night Watchman - Louise Erdrich (fiction)
• 22) The School on Heart's Content Road - Carolyn Chute (fiction)
• 23) Lumen - Tiffany Atkinson (poetry)
• 24) Lifted - Bill Manhire (poetry, re read)
• 25) The Windows of Graceland - Martina Evans (poetry)
• 26) Cut the Black Rabbit - Benjamin Cusden (poetry)
• 27) We Swim to the Shark - Georgie Codd (non fiction)
• 28) Eat or We Both Starve - Victoria Kennefick (poetry)
• 29) Beautiful Nowhere - Louisa Campbell (poetry)
• 30) When I Think of My Body as a Horse - Wendy Pratt (poetry)
• 31) Back When We Were Grownups - Anne Tyler (fiction)
• 32) The Atlas of Lost Beliefs - Ranjit Hoskote (poetry)
• 33) Inmates - Sean Borodale (poetry)
• 34) Wasted Rainbow - Caleb Parkin (poetry)
• 35) The Impossible Dead - Ian Rankin (fiction)
• 36) The Secrets of Us - Lucinda Berry (fiction)
• 37) These Queer Merboys - Serge Neptune (poetry)
• 38) The Attitudes - Katie Griffiths (poetry)
• 39) Pandemonium - Andrew McMillan (poetry)
• 40) The Neighbourhood - Hannah Lowe (poetry)
• 41) Say Cucumber - Lucia Dove (poetry)
• 42) Negative Space - Lilly Dancyger (non fiction)
• 43) Yield - Claire Dyer (poetry)
• 44) The Chronology of Water - Lidia Yuknavitch (non fiction)
• 45) Beautiful Nowhere - Louisa Campbell (poetry, re read)
• 46) Her Lost Language - Jenny Mitchell (poetry)
• 47) A Bright Ray of Darkness - Ethan Hawke (fiction)
• 48) Wishful Drinking - Carrie Fisher (non fiction)
• 49) Poor - Caleb Femi (poetry)
• 50) Boy in Various Poses - Lewis Buxton (poetry)
• 51) My Mother Was an Upright Piano - Tania Hershman (fiction)
• 52) Museum of Ice Cream - Jenna Clake (poetry)
• 53) Honorifics - Cynthia Miller (poetry)
• 54) How to Carry a Fire - Christina Thatcher (poetry)
• 55) A - Sophie Robinson (poetry)
• 56) The Wolf Road - Richard Lambert (YA fiction)
• 57) Comic Timing - Holly Pester (poetry)
• 58) The Burgess Boys - Elizabeth Strout (fiction)
• 59) There's a Hole in My Bucket - Royd Tolkien (non fiction)
• 60) Tennis Lessons - Susannah Dickey (fiction)
• 61) Ponti - Sharlene Teo (fiction)
• 62) Play Lists - Jessica Mookherjee (poetry)
• 63) Max Porter - The Death of Francis Bacon
• 64) Fathom - Rebecca Gethin (poetry)
• 65) Hydra - Molly Ellen Pearson (poetry)
• 66) Štupartská’s Daughter - Elizabeth Jane Timms (poetry)
• 67) The Beauty of Living Twice - Sharon Stone (non fiction)
• 68) Soft Science - Franny Choi (poetry)
• 69) NR30 - Doug Jones (poetry)
• 70) Knowing This Has Changed My Ending - Alex MacDonald (poetry)
• 71) Where I'd Watch Plastic Trees Not Grow - Hannah Hodgson (poetry)
• 72) One Hundred Lockdown Sonnets - Jacqueline Saphra (poetry)
• 73) Terminarchy - Angela France (poetry0
• 74) Volcano - Elosham Vog (poetry)
• 75) Rotten days in Late Summer - Ralf Webb (poetry)
• 76) A God at the Door - Tishani Doshi (poetry)
• 77) Materials for Building a City - Elliot C. Mason (poetry)
• 78) Anchorage - Lorraine Marriner (poetry)
• 79) Gaps - Jenny Danes (poetry)
• 80) Spacecraft - John McCullough (poetry)
• 81) Meanwhile, Trees - Mark Waldron (poetry)
• 82) On Narrowness - Claire Crowther (poetry)
• 83) The Frost Fairs - John McCullough (poetry)
• 84) Ephybos - Kostya Tsloakis (poetry)
• 85) Lung Iron - Daniel Fraser (poetry)
• 86) and they are covered in gold light - Amy Acre (poetry)
• 87) C+nto and Othered Poems - Joelle Taylor (poetry)
• 88) Songs My Enemy Taught Me - Joelle Taylor (poetry)
• 89) Ripe - Isabelle Baafi (poetry)
• 90) Feverfew - Anna Saunders (poetry)
• 91) Fleet - Jane Burn (poetry)
• 92) The Story of No - Emma Hammond (poetry)
• 93) A Gathering of Matter/A Matter of Gathering - Dawn Lundy Martin (poetry)
• 94) The Family Upstairs - Lisa Jewell (fiction)
• 95) My Tin Watermelon - Peter Daniels (poetry)
• 96) physis - Nicolas Pesques (poetry)
• 97) A Year in the New Life - Jack Underwood (poetry)
• 98) The Book of Orgasms - Nin Andrews (poetry)
• 99) Olive Again - Elizabeth Strout (poetry)
• 100) Distance Writing - Margaret Seymour (poetry)
• 101) I Think I Might be Autistic - Cynthia Kim (non fiction)
• 102) All the Names Given - Raymond Antrobus (poetry)
• 103) Strangers - Rebecca Tamas (non fiction)
• 104) The Continued Clsure of the Blue Door - Vik Shirley (poetry)
• 105) Glass - Emily Cooper (poetry)
• 106) The Oscillations - Kate Fox (poetry)
• 107) Single Window - Daniel Sluman (poetry)
• 108) The Gold Rush - Craig Martin Getz (poetry)
• 109) Wow - Bill Manhire (poetry)
• 110) Cosmonaut - A.E. De Vaul (poetry)
• 111) The Sun is Open - Gail McConnell (poetry)
• 112) All the Men I Never Married - Kim Moore (poetry)
• 113) The Kids - Hannah Lowe (poetry)
• 114) Atlantis - Mark Doty (poetry)
• 115) How to Think Like David Bowie - Jonathan Tindale (non fiction)
• 116) Hera Lindsay Bird - Hera Lindsay Bird (poetry)

How I didn’t become a short story writer

First I was a novel writer (aged five).
Then I was a poet.

Then I was a short story writer.

Then I was a poet again.

Then I was a short story writer.

Now I am a poet.

I think I was probably a bad short story writer. 

The first time I was a short story writer I wrote in an experimental style. At that time U.K. publishers did not publish many books of short stories, and certainly not ones by unknown writers. They were definitely not interested in publishing experimental short stories by a young unknown writer who hadn't even been to university. At that time I read a lot of American short story collections which were a huge influence on my work - Jayne Ann Philips, Ellen Gilchrist, Raymond Carver, Tobias Wolff., Louise Erdrich. I think now that what I wrote back then sits somewhere between flash fiction and prose poetry. It rarely had a narrative arc. It was often just sniffing around the edges of something.

I was a kid from a council estate who left school at sixteen and went to live in a hippy commune. But as a kid I virtually lived in the local library, and while I lived in the commune I continued hitchhiking into town to use the library. 

You could say the library saved me. 

You could say the library made me. 

I wasn't educated back then. I didn't know about literary journals. I didn't know much at all really. I loved to read and I loved to write. I wrote in those small reporter's notebooks with the metal spiral at the top and I typed my work up on an electronic typewriter. When I look at those old short stories now, I think that maybe I was ahead of my time. They might have been ahead of their time but they're still not very good. But there's something about them that stops me throwing them out. Repeated words and phrases, poetic rhythms, the kind of surrealism that still appeals to me in writing.

When I have tried to write short stories in recent years they have felt stilted and unimaginative in comparison to those early works. I have become a slave to plot but somehow the plots are never good ones. Either the stories are boring and unoriginal or they don't make sense. It seems I have given over my original thinking to the poet in me and I don't know how to become a short story writer again.